During it all, the fact that life was short as hell had hit me all over again, and I’d also assessed the connection I felt with Lily. I’d decided I was going to give it my all to make sure I didn’t lose what I’d had with her, and if she hadn’t felt the same way, I was going to make her. I came from a family that were tenacious and who fought hard for what they wanted – how convenient was that?
Telling Beau this last bit, I waited for her to laugh in my face. Instead, she nodded understandingly. “That makes sense. When you’re faced with the harsh realities of life, you see things more clearly. Lily was the same when her dad had his heart attack, but she’s taken on all the responsibilities of The Bar, so she kind of been boxed in. She should be out enjoying life, but instead she’s keeping the family and the business afloat.”
That one comment gave me an idea – my family could help shoulder some of the burden. Our parents got along, so they’d be happy to help out. Plus, they could take on some of the bar’s duties so she could have a break, and the pregnancy was the best excuse to make that happen.
“Anyway, back to the point I was making,” I returned to the original part of the conversation and far away from my Gramps, it was still too raw for me. “I’m not the flake that everyone thinks I am, I just live life refusing to let the little things get to me. Sure, sometimes they do, but I refuse to give them the power to take over.”
“You’re afraid it’ll make you do what your friend did,” Beau noted.
“I know that depression is an illness, but people try to kill themselves because of different triggers, not just mental health problems. I never want to put my family through what that family went through, so I look at life less seriously and refuse to let the little things rule my life and thoughts.”
I couldn’t believe that at Satan’s-asshole-o’clock I was having this conversation with someone I hardly knew, but Beau had something about her that made her easy to talk to. Plus, I wanted her to know where I was coming from when it came to her best friend.
Eventually, after leaving us in silence for a couple of minutes, she nodded her head and hummed. “I get it. Don’t sweat the petty stuff.”
Relieved, I snorted, “Right, and don’t pet sweaty stuff.”
Wrinkling her nose, she made a gagging noise. “Gross,” she gagged again. “You know, our Lilith is… unique.”
Our Lilith, I liked that.
“How so?”
She was about to say something, when the sleepwalking beauty carrying my baby stumbled back into the living room.
“The squirrel wants to Netflix and chill, but we’re out of tomatoes,” she mumbled, rubbing her eyes, before stumbling back to her room again.
Waiting until she was out of sight again, I turned back to Beau who was trying not to laugh. “How often exactly does she do that?”
“She’s done it every time I’ve been here,” she chuckled, shaking her head. “The first time I saw her doing it, I woke up to her crying because the elephant had left footprints in her butter.”
I wasn’t sure what to do with this. What I knew about sleepwalking was pretty much slim to none, but at the same time I knew they could do some dangerous shit. “Where does it all come from?”
Looking at me like I was crazy (again), she admitted, “I’m not a sleep therapist or a shrink, so I don’t have a clue. Sometimes, it’s stuff that I know about and that’s relevant to life or what’s happened in the past. The rest of the time, it seems to be random AF.”
A crash from Lily’s bedroom got both of our attentions. “Is she ok?”
“I also can’t see through walls,” she pointed out sarcastically. “If I could, I’d stand outside Chris Hemsworth’s dressing room, one very happy lady.”
Moving toward the hallway to go to Lily’s room, I shot over my shoulder, “Me thinks our Rico Suave might have an issue with that, Ms. Beau.”
Just as my hand touched the doorknob of Lily’s room, I heard Beau mutter, “Fucker!”
I really needed to talk to him.
Five
Tate
Waking up this morning felt different to every other morning. Taking stock of my body, I winced as I moved my head slightly, eyes still closed, wondering why I’d fallen sitting upright against the headboard of the bed. It felt like my spine had frozen in place, and I couldn’t feel either of my butt cheeks when I tried to move them.
Shifting slightly, I realized that my hand was frozen around the object in it. I remembered thinking over things and Googling shit until I’d had to admit defeat, i.e. I’d passed out holding my phone.
But what had I been researching online?
Normally, I was a curious person as it was, so it wasn’t unusual for me to look shit up. My search history on my phone was absolutely insane, and if anyone investigated me, they’d probably recommend a psych eval. Like the time I looked up the size of a squirrel’s balls – those bitches were freaking huge, FYI.
But last night, I’d been searching for hours, but why?
Shifting my ass slightly, I dropped the phone onto the bed relieved to be getting the feeling back in one part of my body. That’s when I heard a groan and felt something tighten around my cock – my very hard cock which was standing to attention and loving the soft hand that was holding it firmly inside my boxers. Apparently I had feeling in areas of my body that I hadn’t realized…
My head snapped to look down at the owner of the hand, and I saw the mass of dark hair on the head resting right beside my crotch. As in, it was so close to my lap that if the person shifted forward a couple of inches, they could angle my dick toward their…
Lily!
It all came back to me at once, Lily, the fight, Lily again, the memories of that night we had together – finally – jail, and the fact she was carrying my baby.
I was scared, nervous and excited all at the same time about the fact I was going to be a dad. I wasn’t lying when I told Beau I believed her and that it was mine. The James’s were a rare breed of people, not unlike my family in terms of their honesty and morals. There’s no way Lily would lie about it being mine.
Plus, it sounded strange, but I could feel it. Something inside me just knew it was mine. Strange, but true. My family were good judges of character, and so far my Spidey senses had never led me astray.
I had other senses that were overriding those Spidey ones at the moment though, mainly how soft her hand was, and how good it felt as she tightened and loosened her grip. If she could just move it up and down slightly…
Fuck, no! Just before I fell asleep, I’d decided that I wanted to do this the right way for Lily and the baby, in fact for all of us. I know we’d already done it backwards, but I wanted to get to know her and for her to get to know me. I didn’t want the baby to come into the world, and for its parents to still be treading carefully around each other because they didn’t even know the other one’s likes and dislikes. That’s not how it was meant to be, so I was going to make sure that we did it properly.
I’d come across a women’s chat site before I fell asleep, and one of the threads had been called How do I get my man to woo me? There had been over a thousand comments under it on the things women wanted him to do to woo her, ignoring the bitter Betty’s whose comments would scare the shit out of a man.
So, armed with notes, I was going to woo Lily James.
This meant no sex. It also meant no hand around penis, regardless of how good it felt.
I couldn’t stop the whimper that came out of me as I reached down to try to free my cock, but the determination to do this right won over the feeling of her soft hand rubbing up and down, and maybe stopping at the tip to rub the... My dick would totally hate me for this – I hated me for it.
Apparently her determination was stronger than mine though, because she just gripped it even tighter. Random muttering came out of her shifting my eyes from here grip on my dick to her face, bracing for whatever she was going to come out with, but none of it ended up being like it was last night
.
That was also something I’d looked up to see if there was anything I could do to help her when I’d realized how easily she could just walk out of her door and get hurt or killed. It had ended up being a lesson in why you should never look up things like that online because the horror stories and advice had scared the shit out of me. Regardless, I’d clenched tight, so I didn’t shit myself, sifted through it all, and had focused on the best bits of advice available. I really hoped she didn’t want to sleep alone ever again though, that just wasn’t happening.
I’d even looked at getting some sort of alarm to attach to her so that if she passed a sensor on the door, it woke me up. That was being overnighted and would arrive tomorrow, so I only had tonight to get through without it. Maybe I could tie her wrist to the bed or something?
Throughout all of this, I was still trying to free my poor penis from her grip which was tightening with each tug I gave her hand to get her to let go. Unfortunately, this meant that she was also giving my cock a tight tug too, making my eyes cross and my belly clench.
And then she went and moved so that her head was on my thigh, her mouth about an inch away from the appendage that was screaming at me to just let her do what she wanted. Just then she let out a sigh and it wafted across the wet tip, almost tipping me over the edge. As if that wasn’t bad enough, she followed it by licking her lips, her tongue getting dangerously close to it.
“Lily,” I rasped, planting both fists in the mattress and scooting backwards. “Baby, please.”
As I moved again, her head fell off my thigh and landed on the mattress, the impact waking her up.
“Earthquake!” she shrieked, sitting upright.
This would have been amusing if she wasn’t still holding onto my penis firmly, meaning that she pulled me forward with her, making me scream.
That’s when all hell broke loose as Beau crashed through the door, making Lily lose her balance and fall off the side of the bed… Still. Holding. On. Tight.
* * *
Forty minutes, and an icepack later…
“Oh God, it was awful,” Beau gulped wiping her eyes for the millionth time. “The look on your face!”
I still wasn’t finding it funny. My cock was lucky to have made it out alive – although, in my opinion it was still touch and go on that – and Lily had bruised her thigh when she’d landed on the floor. It had been complete carnage, with both of us screaming at the same time.
“I said I was sorry,” she mumbled, hiding behind her hair still. “I didn’t know what I had hold of. I thought it was the red balloon in my dream.”
“Were you being chased by a clown, too?” Beau wheezed.
Someone knocking on the front door right then interrupted us – it was probably my dignity and the remaining foundations of my penis. I mean, in my mind it was like a tree. You had the trunk, and you had the roots, and we’d all seen what happens after a storm when a tree falls over and those roots are in the air still attached to the rest of the tree, right? Well, in the ground there would still be roots that had been left behind when it fell, just ripped off at the root – that was now my cock.
When the knocking continued, Lily pleaded, “Can you answer it? Every time I take a step, my butt cheek feels like a rhino’s trying to get out of it.”
“I can’t even look at you,” Lily’s evil cow of a best friend gasped as she walked past to answer the door, with her hand shielding the side of her face. We could still hear her laughing as she got to the front door which quickly turned into an unamused, “What the fuck?”
“Morning, chuckles,” a deep male voice that I immediately recognized as belonging to Rich replied.
His heavy footsteps and the sound of boots on wood followed as he walked toward where we were sitting in the living room, clearly not waiting on an invite in from her.
As he cleared the doorway to the room, we heard a muttered, “What just happened?” – something which I’d been asking myself for almost an hour as I tried to reattach my dick to its anchoring point on my body.
His eyebrows shot up as he took in me lying out on the couch with a bag of frozen peas on my crotch, and Lily lying on the other with an icepack under her thigh. I’d been a gentleman and let her have it while we waited for the others to refreeze. “Good night was it?”
Realizing what he meant, Lily blushed bright red and pulled her hair further over her face. It was like watching a turtle go back into its shell.
“We had an accident,” I ground out.
“Seeing as how y’all made a baby together, I’m confused how you missed and did whatever it was that you did,” he gestured from my crotch to Lily’s ass.
Sighing, I dropped my head back down onto the armrest and stared up at the ceiling. “Why are you here?”
“Yes, why are you here?” Beau repeated, finally walking into the room again.
People might look at Rich and see a charming man who could wrap a woman around his finger, but he was actually a good guy who respected everyone. That’s why it confused me so much that she had such an issue with him.
“Your mom said you were here, and I wanted to check in with you after last night.” Then, he added to who I assume was Beau, “And, seeing your face is an unexpected surprise, one that I’ll mention is a total bonus.”
The silence that followed had me opening my eyes to see what was going on, just in time to catch her glaring at him before she walked over to one of the recliners and plonked her ass down, viciously pulling the lever that popped the foot rest out. Still not saying a word back, she lifted her cheek and pulled out the magazine she’d sat down on and opened it.
“That’s upside down,” I told her helpfully, looking back at Rich and missing what her response to me was. “I’m good. Well, aside from this,” I pointed at the obvious issue at hand. Maybe best not to call it that, the hand thing was still a sore subject.
Rolling his eyes, Rich looked over at Lily and grinned. “Morning, Lily!”
“Good morning, Rich,” she replied, looking anywhere but at him.
“Was it a good morning?”
That was enough to break her embarrassment. Getting slowly up off the couch, she snapped, “Eat shit and die, you big asshole!” Before storming out of the room.
Told you he wasn’t a charmer!
Bursting out laughing, he shook his head and only narrowly avoided Beau who was storming out after her best friend. “You’ve got a way with the ladies, man.”
Nodding, he grinned over at me as he took Beau’s recently vacated chair. “Looks that way, doesn’t it?”
“What are you actually doing here?” I asked, knowing full well he wouldn’t have turned up just to check in on me.
“Dude from last night is making waves,” he sighed. “Apparently, he’s now accusing the PD of putting him in a cell with us, and allowing us to rough him up because of who you are.”
“Is he that stupid?” Getting a droll look in response, I nodded, realizing what I’d just asked. “He’s that stupid.”
“Your parents have called the lawyer again,” he muttered, both of us wincing at the same time. “Yeah, he wasn’t happy about it either. If it helps,” he added, “it seems to have made him more determined to kick the dude’s ass, though?”
Yeah, that definitely helped. “What do we do now?”
“If you’d checked your phone, you’d have found out that we’ve been given the day off while he talks to the po-po about it,” he yawned, groaning as he stretched out and wiggled his ass into the chair.
“Make yourself comfortable why don’t you,” Beau snapped as she walked back in carrying a cup of coffee.
Both of us tensed as she moved in his direction, most likely thinking the same thing – that she was going to dump it out on his crotch. Instead, she passed it over to him, pulling her hand back quickly before turning to look at me. “If you’ve got the day off, could you help with King Ferdinand?”
Who the shit was King Ferdinand?
* * *
“It’s a Pekin chicken,” Lily told us as we stared down at the bird pecking at our feet. “I’ve had him since he was born.”
Both of us looked over at her as she spoke and then looked back at each other. “It’s a Peking chicken?” we asked at the same time, definitely thinking the same thing.
“Pekin, not Peking.”
“Baby,” I muttered, doing my best not to laugh. “It still sounds like number eighty-six on the menu sitting on my counter at home whether you add the g on or not.”
I lost the battle at the same time as Rich and burst out laughing, which apparently was a big mistake. “Screw you guys!” she hissed, leaning in and poking both of us on the chest. “We don’t discuss food of that variety around him.”
“True story,” Beau added. “Would you like someone to discuss eating wiener’s around about now?”
That made me stop laughing at the same time that Rich started laughing even harder. He could do that, his dick didn’t have penis traumatic stress disorder like mine did – the lucky bastard.
Then something occurred to me. “You called your chicken King Ferdinand?”
Nodding happily, Lily smiled as she looked down at him. “Yeah, I loved the Disney cartoon Brave.”
That’s all fair and well, but… “You called a chicken King Ferdinand?” I repeated again.
Tainted Gold: Providence Gold Series Book Three Page 7